Latest / Exit Algorithms / $450M in Deals & the M&A Playbook: Double Your Biz Through Acquisition | Marty Fahncke (#40)
Transcript
- speaker-0: Welcome to exit algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations, and prepare your business for a high value exit. I'm your host Pete Vera. And today we got Marty Fanky in the building. He's a certified M &A advisor with over 35 years of marketing experience. He's the founder of Westbound road and has personally executed over $450 million in acquisitions. Marty, so excited to have you here. Welcome to the show. speaker-1: Thanks for having me, Pete. I'm excited to be here and hope we share some great content for your listeners. speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah, I we can probably talk all day. How about we start off, do mind sharing how your bit your background and, you know, your your business journey. I'd love to hear Yeah, the whole the whole thing. speaker-1: How many hours do you have? I'll try and go real quick. So entrepreneur from early on as a teenager, I like sold vacuums and water purifiers. I had some sort of business thing going on ⁓ ⁓ bounced around from kind of different corporate jobs that I've done really well at to ⁓ ventures. In my twenties, ⁓ ⁓ a business with some friends ⁓ it was acquired for a million and half dollars in cash, which was really cool at the time. And that was my first exposure to acquisitions. learned a lot of things that not to do during that transactions looking back. And then from there went on to work with another company that was private equity backed and we grew through acquisition. We built that business from doing about $80 million a year to about $600 million a year. As part of that, my division, I grew it from a million and half dollars a year to $30 million a year. primarily through acquisition and organic growth combined. then ⁓ on some other growth initiatives, all told represent a billion dollars in ⁓ growth sales. About six years ago, I decided to use acquisition as a model and create a portfolio of businesses ⁓ that I operate using all of my ⁓ skills and And I noticed there was a real need in the marketplace for business brokers who weren't idiots. And I use that word deliberately because I'll tell you what, I ran into just some of the worst interactions I've ever had. And I was talking to business owners about selling their business to me and I'd look at it and I'd say, well, know, great, I like your business, but it's not something I'm gonna acquire today. And they'd say, well, okay, but do you have someone else that might wanna buy it? And so I said, well, actually I might. And so I started connecting business sellers with business buyers. ⁓ I realized there was a need in the marketplace for truly ⁓ professional advisors in the role. And started Westbound Road. I started with my business partner from previous ventures that we had done, ⁓ had very successful before. ⁓ And kind of where we work today. So now we're advisory firm. We're not a brokerage necessarily. ⁓ We work with businesses to prepare their business for sale. Our optimal timing for a client is to work with them three years prior to them being ready to sell their business to get the business truly ready to sell. And then once it's ready to sell, obviously we help find the buyer and make the transaction go smoothly. But we're really more consulting than just a brokerage, but that's where we are today. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ I love it. That's awesome. Yeah. And I always do a bit of research. I saw you have a huge background in marketing. Yes. ⁓ that right? ⁓ how has that helped you along your business journey? speaker-1: ⁓ man. You know, ⁓ and marketing both, mean, like I said, I started out as a salesman, And I'm one of the few people in the world to be like, I was a salesman. am a salesman. Like everything, ⁓ is sales involved, right? So nothing happens until the sale is made and marketing drives sales. And like I said, I've done about a billion dollars in and marketing through ⁓ selling, know, everything from, like I said, water purifiers to, ⁓ you fitness equipment to, I've done a lot of stuff on television. I'm a QVC certified presenter. sold a lot of stuff. Those skillsets translate really, really well to business acquisitions because selling is about identifying filling those needs, ⁓ effective and really a market for a product or service, right? So selling a business for sale ⁓ is really a skillset to ⁓ where I was doing marketing, selling, know, call center services in the hundreds, know, hundreds of thousands of dollars contracts for call center services or other things that I've done over the years, infomercial products that have done, you know, tens of millions of dollars. It's all similar skillset. So if you know how to sell something, if you know how to market effectively, you know, open, educate, find need, close it, you can be successful in life. And ⁓ so I've those skills to our acquisition services. I would say the most telling example is when we do work with a business seller to sell their business, the last two years we've averaged five offers for every deal we've brought to market and we've had as many as 12. And part of that is because our team are all really good marketers. And so we employ marketing skills to our acquisitions strategies so that we generate the greatest demand possible from potential buyers. so that we have lots of offers to choose from, they compete with each other and our clients get the best possible deal with the best possible buyer. speaker-0: Got it. Yeah, so directly relevant. Continues to pay. speaker-1: Absolutely. So, you know, a lot of times people get into business brokerage or business advisor, exit advisory, you know, they have a banking background quite often or, or, know, some, they usually have financing, baking around in there where we found that a marketing background is very effective because it really gets the job done. speaker-0: Sure. Yeah. And you talked about your first business sale you had and ⁓ wasn't the smoothest. What were some lessons ⁓ from that? Did you use a business broker when you started? speaker-1: No, no. And so what that was, it was three guys who we built a business, truly grassroots business. was, you know, just we, one of the guys had an idea for an invention. The other guy created it I was the guy that went out and sold it. and so one day we'd been in business about an 18 months. I got it on television in the United States, Japan, Brazil, a couple of places. And one day this company called and said, Hey, we'd like to buy you. We'll give you a million and a half dollars cash. And we're like, Okay, ⁓ did the transaction and ⁓ made a million and half dollars. We thought we were the smartest guys in the world. What didn't know ⁓ at time was that who was buying us was a private equity firm. I didn't know what a private equity firm was then. Why they were buying us was they were doing a roll up in the category. I didn't know what a roll up was. And I didn't that I should like, ⁓ know, somebody comes says to buy your ⁓ company. company you should negotiate maybe, or you should bring on some advice, or we just like, okay, and sign the papers. The big mistake I made there was had we understood all of that, we probably would have negotiated for some equity in the rollup, not just cash. I went back a couple of years later after that particular rollup actually went public, and I calculated that that million and a half dollars in cash would have been about $24 million. had we turned it purely into equity. Now we had no, I don't know if the other side would have even allowed us to do that. I think probably they would have done half and half. Maybe we could have gotten, you know, three quarters of a million dollars to split between us and then the other, you know, half rolled in equity. But I didn't even know to ask that. And so we left a lot on the table and, but I didn't get help. I didn't ask anybody for advice. And I certainly didn't understand what was really happening there. Somebody just. you know, waive some money and we said, So that's, I guess that's a lesson for your listeners. know, first of all, if somebody just contacts you to acquire your business, they may or may not be the best buyer for you. ⁓ should, ⁓ know, obviously if you're thinking about selling and somebody's reaching out to buy you, the first thing you should do is say, well, I wonder if there's others who might want to buy me as well. And let's get some competing offers here. Let's see what the best offer is. And the best way to do that is to get an advisor to help you with that process and understand what you're really dealing with. So those are the big lessons I learned in the process. I don't regret it. Like we did, you know, we built a nice little business, we sold it, we made some nice money. But looking back, I definitely left a lot on the table. speaker-0: Makes sense. Yeah, you wouldn't even know what to ask really. Right. Usually the bet the first offer someone gives you I feel like there's some old that you know never accept the first offer. speaker-1: Yeah, we were like I said, and I think we negotiated a little bit. I think they might've offered a little less and we're like, nah, we think we wanted a million and half so we could each have a half a million bucks. And they were like, okay, I think they came in at like a million two or something. I think we negotiated a little bit, but like I said, had we taken some equity, we would've done a lot better down the speaker-0: Sure. Yeah, could you talk a bit about the of that for listeners to understand easily? You know, if they have equity, how that can equate to multiple millions more than just, you know, an all cash offer? Yeah. speaker-1: ⁓ Yeah, that's a great point. So a company is doing a roll up and a roll up is basically somebody comes along and they wanna do a consolidation of businesses in a certain industry and whether that's ⁓ competitive So let's say somebody wants to do a roll up of all the auto repair shops in a given geographic area. So they kind of dominate the space. That's one of roll up or another kind of roll up might be vertically integrated roll ups. let's ⁓ using the repair shop analogy, maybe they buy they buy auto repair shops, but they also buy auto parts suppliers in the region. Like who do those auto repair shops buy from, right? They buy from like maybe a regional auto parts supplier. Well, now they buy both of those and do a vertically integrated roll-up so that they're buying from themselves, which is a really smart move, right? So that's what a roll-up is. And lot of times those are backed by private equity firms ⁓ other that eventually their plan is to execute the roll up, create an entity where the value of it is greater than its parts, and then sell it or go public. Now, if you as a business owner are one piece of that roll up, and you are able to get some equity in that, you might sell your business for, you know, three times multiple valuation. And once it's part of a bigger roll up, it might go for a 12 times or 15 times multiple valuation. So if you don't take cash, or as much cash upfront and you leave some equity in play, then you might have a much bigger payday down the road. So it's something to think about, but you have to really understand the nuances and what is the strength of the company that's buying you? What is their plan? I with a client down in Texas to do a roll-up and he no plans of ever actually selling the business. So taking equity in his business would not be good because he's building a big. ⁓ entity that he wants to leave to his family, his kids are involved, and he wants to leave it as a legacy to his family. Well, having equity in that business would be a terrible idea, because you'll never be able to extract the money from it. So you've really got to understand, but there could be a very, very big opportunity. It's sometimes called a second bite of the apple, meaning you take some money from your business now by selling it, and then you get a lot more down the road by having somebody else ⁓ grow it and create a bigger multiple. speaker-0: Yeah, thank you. Well said. That's exactly... I like to have professionals like you explain it because it just sounds so good. ⁓ speaker-1: Nobody's ever asked me that question before. I've told that story a few times. Nobody's ever asked it that way. So really good question, Pete. Good. speaker-0: ⁓ Yeah, and I know you're a big proponent of growth through acquisition. Yeah, can you maybe talk about some of the pros of that or, ⁓ know, a lot of business owners might have it stuck in their head. They've, they've grown the business to where it is today through organic only. So some people can just have, you know, a brain blast when they hear about growing through acquisition. Yeah, what are some of the main benefits of doing that? speaker-1: Yeah, so I talk about how to double your business without selling more stuff, right? So if you're that auto repair shop or you're a plumber or you're an accountant or you sell goods and services, ⁓ you say, I wanna really grow my business, most people go, okay, how do I grow? Well, I gotta advertise more, I gotta hire more salespeople, ⁓ gotta do all these things to grow my business. Well, here's the problem. Most business owners, ⁓ you think about efforts you've done to really scale your business, when you start trying to scale, you start to take bigger risks, right? You buy more advertising, but guess what? Not all advertising works. So you start losing efficiency in your advertising. You wanna hire more salespeople? Not every salesperson's gonna work out. You're probably gonna lower your standards a little bit and maybe hire some that aren't gonna work. So you start to increase costs you don't always increase revenues. So what I see working with a lot of business owners is they get on a hyperscale path ⁓ ⁓ they might or might not actually achieve the growth numbers they want, but if they do, they often do it at a substantially lower profit margin. What's the point of growing if you're not growing your revenue, if you're not growing your profits? And so because you're taking more risks and because scaling things tend to become less efficient, it actually may not be the best way to go. So we talk about growth requisition. So ⁓ back to, let's ⁓ an auto repair shop that I was just talking about. If you have an auto repair shop and you're kind of maxed out, like all your bays are always full all day long, and so how can you grow that? Well, perhaps instead of trying to build new bays or trying to do whatever it is you're trying to do to grow it, what if you acquire an auto repair shop down the road? Acquire your competitor. Or as the example I mentioned earlier, you acquire the that you buy all your parts from, right? Let's to ⁓ your ⁓ You buy your competitor, a couple of things happen. You already know it's a known quantity, right? You know that they're stable in business, that you wanna buy one that's been in business for a number of years, they've got good reputation, they've got good reviews, they have a solid customer base, the employee's already in place, the revenue's already in place, everything's already been done, so the risk is taken out of it. So when you acquire them, put it onto your business, now if you have a $3 million a year business, auto repair shop and you buy another $3 million auto repair shop. Now you've got a $6 million auto repair shop and you've taken very little risk to make that, to double your revenues and double your profits because it's all already been done for you. The biggest ⁓ that business owners have in something that's like, wait a minute, Mark, that's like what the big boys, that's what airlines and banks do, all this kind of stuff. I don't $3 million to go buy another business like that that's my size. What they don't realize is that there are tons of ways to finance a deal like that that allow you to do it either for very little money or oftentimes no money. So in the case of the auto repair shop I was mentioning, if you have a business that's and profitable ⁓ you wanna go buy another one that's just like you and bolt it on, if you're in the United States, the SBA has a program that's ⁓ expansion loan. that basically, let's say you're a contractor and you're gonna go out and do more business and you need more tractors and dump trucks and and ⁓ you can go to the SBA and say, hey, I'm gonna expand my business and I need a million dollars for all of this equipment. And if everything pencils out, they say, sure, here's a million dollars. The same thing happens if you're buying your competitor. ⁓ look at it as just as if you're buying equipment or buying a new building or something. ⁓ so they'll actually give you that money. ⁓ and you don't take anything out of your pocket and you leverage that deal and as long as the business is cash flowing positively, they won't give you the money if it's not a profitable deal. And so instantly, you take no money out of your pocket but you double your business. Now, that's a pretty good deal, right? If that isn't the scenario that's in play, then there are still funds available that you can get for as little as 10%, 15 % down. So you buy that $3 million business, maybe you have to come up with, you 300 grand, 400 grand, somewhere in there. But you're buying a business that may be spinning off $500,000 a year in profit. Okay, you invest 300,000, you pay yourself back in nine months. So there's ways to do that. People don't really think about how, A, low risk it is to buy versus build, and B, how leverageable that is from a financial standpoint. You don't need as much money as you think you would need. speaker-0: Yeah, wow, I love that. Yeah, it's more accessible than people realize. And I love your emphasis on risk. I haven't heard that argument for growth acquisition, but I definitely agree. It makes a lot of sense, especially if they're in your backyard, you know that you've been competing with them for years. speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well, and if they are a direct competitor, then the other thing is that taking out a competitor immediately lowers your, you you're no longer fracturing your market, your customer base, right? So your customer acquisition costs may even go down because you're not competing with them. Now you are them. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and financing is a big piece. ⁓ one of your areas of expertise, I think, right? Can you maybe some tactics, some funding strategies that ⁓ you ⁓ seen used or recommend for ⁓ business owners? speaker-1: Oh my gosh, I've seen it all. So I just touched on a couple, right? Like, you know, leverage debt, SBA funding, outside of that, I've seen all sorts of, and created all sorts of cool ways. We have over 230 different ways of funding a deal. But just a couple of other examples that you might see, you know, revenue-based funding, RBF, asset-based funding. You know, let's say you are a contractor, you've got all these, you know, tractors and dump trucks, whatever, you know. And let's say they're already appreciated and paid off. Well, guess what? You can go and borrow against that to raise capital if you need. Obviously, borrowing against real estate, et cetera. then bringing in OPM, other people's money. ⁓ are people out there looking for really good investments in ⁓ high opportunities who may want to come in and ⁓ it's debt, it's equity. They say, well, I'd love to be a partner with you. I'd love to fund this growth and let's put a plan together, ⁓ especially you're thinking about exiting and. three to five, six years, an investor may come along and say, heck, I've got the money. Let's go and do this. I might be able to 10X my money if we do it right. And that's a great investment. third party investments. seen people ⁓ against a 401k. A lot of people don't realize you can borrow against a ⁓ By the way, I'm not saying take out or draw against ⁓ 401k. That gets you get hit with heavy tax penalties. But if you borrow against your 401k, you're allowed to borrow up to $50,000 against your 401k, by the way. A, there's no penalty. B, you're borrowing from yourself. So the interest actually goes back into your 401k. And it's a great way to leverage money. We see people who do home equity loans to borrow against their house to get it. You ⁓ it, ⁓ seen it. If the deal is right, we'll figure out how to make ⁓ money happen in cash flow and everybody wins. speaker-0: Yeah, no, it's awesome. Um, and I think there, there's an old viewpoint of risk as being really, or I mean, uh, debt as being really risky. Um, but if you are confident that the asset you're buying will generate enough cashflow to, you know, be paying the loan off and then, and then some, you know, I think what the industry standards 1.25 cover ratio, right. It's not. If you look at it through that lens, it doesn't seem that risky as you know, right? speaker-1: Yeah. I mean, if, if a business is, is cash flowing a hundred thousand dollars a month and the debt it takes to acquire it is, you know, $75,000. a month in debt, then that would cover your 1.25. We like to be a little more conservative. We shoot for a 1.35 to 1.5, is there a minimum, but with our clients, because we really want to make sure they're really well taken care of. But yeah, 1.25 is kind of the industry standard, and that leaves you some buffer to make sure the business is cash flowing and profitable. And even the debt on top of acquiring it still leaves you with profit. speaker-0: Yeah, awesome. And speaking of taking care of clients, I know you said you start to, like to see a couple years of of runway before the exit. What's your thought process ⁓ on that and what you prepare ⁓ for first your clients? speaker-1: Yeah, we love to see our clients working with us about three years before their exit. There are so many things that go into an effective exit that most business owners think about or don't think about because they're so focused on their business, right? ⁓ so ⁓ of different strategies come into play. So I'll just give you a couple of quick examples. So one example we had not too long ago was a business that ⁓ in a niche industry. ⁓ And they, almost everybody in their industry used a particular kind of CRM system. And they decided they didn't like that CRM system, they were gonna kind of build their own. And so they did. And came time to to sell the business and several acquirers looked at it said, the hassle of trying to integrate with this kind of homegrown CRM, it wasn't worth it. Some of them walked away and it ultimately probably cost them, we finally did sell it, but it only ultimately. probably cost them about a million dollars because it devalued their business because of the risk and time and energy involved the buyers looking at that business. like, ⁓ didn't they just go with the industry standard? Everybody's agreed, this is the best one. It's an industry standard. ⁓ the fact that they went with kind of a homegrown one made it so that trying to integrate or not integrate, ⁓ from one to the other was even more complicated than if they'd even chosen another standard like the second or third tier. ⁓ So that's a decision that had they come to us we would have said, no, no, no, stick with the industry standard because we always go with ⁓ the philosophy of beginning with the end in mind. So we look at a business and say, who's going to buy you and why? Okay, now that we've identified that, let's customize your business so that it looks like that when you're ready to sell. And then the buyer's already in place. ⁓ And we would have done that same process with them, but they didn't do that. The other thing that we see a lot of is a question of ⁓ shore or domestic employees. Like a lot of people are ⁓ outsourcing other countries and things like that. And ⁓ that be in certain businesses that can ⁓ alienate lot of buyers. Okay. Other businesses, they don't care. The other business, they like that because it increases the margins. But depending on the business, ⁓ your about whether you use offshore talent, near shore talent or domestic talent, can substantially impact the value of your business. And it depends on the industry you're in. So we need to look at that and say, you have mostly very high cost employees in a business that doesn't need them. You can increase your margins by offshoring this part of it and increase your margins to increase your valuation. And other times we say, you don't want any offshore employees. We need you to have all W2 domestic employees because that's what the buyers are looking for. And then the last thing we'll see, and again, we look at 100. different things, but one thing that I'll talk about that's very common is tax mitigation versus profit maximization. So Pete, you know, but many business owners don't know, but you know that most businesses are valued on a multiple of profit. Would you agree with that? Yes. Okay. So we see, especially in small businesses, we see a lot of times where a business owner will come and say, hey, look, I had great revenues. but I've done all these tax strategies to make it look like I've had no profit so that I don't have to pay taxes. Okay, great, here's the problem. You did a tax mitigation strategy, took that dollar, made it not profit so that you could save 20 cents in taxes. But if you're in an industry that's a five times multiple at sale, that dollar just became $5 you lost in business valuation. So you're saving 20 cents and leaving five bucks on the table. Does that math even make sense? But most owners do not think of that. And so, and there's a three year look back on most financials and most M &A transactions. And so it's important that you have that in place and you start focusing less on tax minimization and more on profit maximization. So those are just a few examples of some of the things we advise our clients in that three year period. And it makes a big, big, big difference once they're ready to sell. speaker-0: Yeah. Wow. I love that. Those are unique responses. I usually get the same, ⁓ key man risks. So make sure there's SOPs and someone else to take over the business. Those are the obvious, basic ones. Yeah. I like your answers better. awesome. Yeah. Customer concentration. ⁓ speaker-1: ⁓ I have all that, all that too, but that's- customer concentration, business operating system, having the obviously the more removed the owner is from the business, the more valuable it is. ⁓ are definitely important as well. ⁓ I said, those are kind of like the, are the layups. We dig deep to find the ⁓ real there and make a big difference with our clients of millions of dollars. ⁓ speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ I love it. Definitely a value add there. And is frustrating because I talk to a lot of buyers. I might the first person that they've, or sellers, mean, I'm on the buy side, I'm the first person they talk to that they're like, ⁓ I could, you know, ⁓ the light bulb goes I can sell my business. And they've been doing that tax mitigation strategy that you're talking about. So then we look at the tax returns, we're like, ⁓ no. know, it's not impossible to get a loan, but on business, but it takes so much extra work trying to document all the ad backs, et cetera. So clean financials, I think is a general theme that will help you not only in you know, in the day-to-day business, but when you go up to sale, it's going to increase it like crazy too. ⁓ speaker-1: without question. speaker-0: Yeah, so another major theme of this show is ⁓ AI and technology. How are you deploying that with Westbound Road today or even outside of that in just your day-to-day? speaker-1: That's an interesting question. So we approaching cautiously. We aren't necessarily using it offensively, we're using it defensively. Now what I mean by that is that we don't generate a lot of our content via AI. There's a lot of things we could do, but we choose not to do because we feel ⁓ we're a very. kind of bow cheek, white glove agency, and we don't wanna just throw it out to AI and call it good. However, we know that especially if we're looking to sell a business and we've got one on the market, and let's say we have, not uncommon for us to have 500 buyers ⁓ a particular business that we might bring to market. We know ⁓ they're taking our SIM and our financials and everything else, and we know that they're running them through AI. So we will do it before that. We'll run a simulation and say, if I'm a business buyer and I'm looking at this business, me what concerns you'd have or tell me what you'd ⁓ a business buyer to look at so that we can be defensive about them. Say, okay, ⁓ what AI is gonna tell people, because we know they're gonna run it through. So we address that upfront and kind of do the work for them and say, okay, here's some things that AI is saying might be areas we need to. we need to clarify or might be red flags that we need to address, et cetera. So that's kind of the way we use it is we use it the way our customers would use it so that we can always be one step ahead of. speaker-0: smart. Yeah, I love that. makes sense. You got to stay relevant and make sure what you're giving is not something easily replaced by AI or just made. ⁓ speaker-1: Yeah. I mean, there's a whole culture that's like, know, if I'm sick, I'm just gonna, you know, go to AI and diagnose myself and I don't need to go to a doctor. And ⁓ that works and sometimes it doesn't. ⁓ similar to our business, you know, most this is a transaction that's probably the biggest transaction of anyone's life. And they not trust AI to do the transaction for them. It's not always accurate. Trust me. We find, bad information in AI outputs. We find bad numbers in AI outputs. Do not trust AI to do the work for you. ⁓ It is not yet to the point where it can be fully trusted to give you the advice that you wanna take on a multi-multi-million dollar transaction that may impact your entire life. So we put some human logic and experience to the AI output and make sure that it's the right stuff. speaker-0: Yeah, 100 % agree. It's not there, not there yet. No. It's based on the inputs and not all inputs online are accurate, right? So you do need a professional to keep it in the rails and then also interpret it appropriately, I think. speaker-1: Exactly. Exactly. speaker-0: Yeah, I don't think that's going away for some time. We'll Yeah, eventually. But yeah, I know we're coming up here on time soon. Whereas I always end with, you know, one practical tip they could give business owners. You've already given so much advice as they look up to go and sale, but yeah, I'd to give you the floor one more time. And then ⁓ speaker-1: I hope not. speaker-0: Also, just share where can find you easiest. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm gonna give two tips. So tip number one, we've kind of touched on, if you're a business owner, you should definitely consider growth through acquisition. It's just something that is so powerful and such a high leverage that many business owners don't think about. And ⁓ a really powerful tool. But the other tip I'm gonna talk about if you're a business owner is you should always have your business ⁓ cell ready condition. even if you never plan to sell it. And there's a lot of benefits to that. But we talked about like, you know, if you have your financials in order, if you are working on an owner exit so that you are above the business and not in the business and know, all the things that we talked about, right? ⁓ only will that business be ready to sell in case something happens. And we talk about, in our business, we talk about the five D's and the B, right? Divorce, disease, death, debt, disagreements and the B is burnout. Things happen. Every business owner will exit their business at some point. Every business owner. And most don't prepare for it. So you should always have your business in sell ready condition no matter what. And if you do, your business will be much better to own. you do all the steps that you need to do to make your business run well, ⁓ going to have a business that's easier to run, it's more profitable, it's less stress, and you'll probably be making more money and working less to have it. So that would be the biggest tip I have is that even if you never plan to sell your business, if you create the steps to prepare your business for sale, then even if you never sell it, you as the owner will have a better business to offer. speaker-0: Love it. Well said. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect way to end it. Great conversation, Marty. And yeah, so is there a, how do you prefer to be reached out? LinkedIn? ⁓ yeah. ⁓ speaker-1: I I should be self promotional now, huh? I forgot to be self promotional. Yeah, so I can be reached a couple of different ways. Our website is westboundroad.com, westboundroad.com. And then I'm very active on LinkedIn, I share content and information ⁓ continually. I'm on a lot of podcasts. We take those ⁓ and create shorts and put really good valuable information out there. And the only Marty Fonky in the entire world. So if you just Google me, you're going to come to me. And so it's very important for me. ⁓ that we do a great job for our clients, that we do a great job for the people we work with, because I'm so easy to find. If I screw up, everybody's gonna know it. So you can even just Google my name, because it's a pretty unique name. But LinkedIn and our website would be the best way to get ahold. speaker-0: Awesome. Yeah, I'll leave that in the show notes as well. All right. Thank you, Marni Fonky. Great having you on the show. speaker-1: Thanks, Pete. Great ⁓ interview.